(eng) Paul Preuss by Secret Passages

Author:Secret Passages [Passages, Secret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

17

Peter knew nothing about Minakis except that he was said to have done early work on semiconductors, half theoretical, half practical, back in the 1950s before Peter was born. Peter knew little about the solid state and had never read anything Minakis had written.

Now there were these drawings and notes spread out on the bed beside the suitcase that Peter was packing as quickly as he could. What slowed him down was that he kept stopping to ponder some facet of Minakis’s scheme. Though solid-state physics had little in common with particle physics, no branch of physics was unaffected by quantum theory, and it was evident that Minakis had thought about its paradoxes long and deeply. It was equally evident that he had a flair for experiment that Peter lacked.

Earlier, when Peter had tried to track Minakis down, he’d learned about the yacht, which had left Mykonos shortly after one o’clock. But Mrs. Thanatopolou didn’t know its destination and she had no luck trying to raise La Parisienne on the villa’s satellite phone. Mrs. Thanatopolou put Peter through to the University of Athens, where Minakis occasionally lectured, and she did most of the talking for him until the secretary yielded up an Athens street address and a phone number. But there was no answer at the number, not even a machine.

Peter thanked Mrs. Thanatopolou for her efforts and hung up, then stacked a couple of cord adapters and plugged his laptop into the phone jack. He hunched over its tiny keyboard, searching for traces of Minakis on the net. The net was wide in space but shallow in time: he found references to a few of Minakis’s recent articles and letters in The Oxford Journal of Archaeology, Revue archeologique, and Praktika tis en Athinais Archaiologikis Etaireias, but Minakis didn’t seem to have published any physics papers lately. When Peter finally snapped the laptop shut and stuffed it back in its bag, all he had was a list of articles about archaeology.

Well, he would have to go to Athens anyway; it was impossible to get anywhere in a hurry without going through Athens.

There was one more call he ought to make. He hadn’t spoken to Jenny in three days; he’d expected to see her when her mother arrived on Mykonos. Not that she was likely to hold it against him... and what would he say when Madame Brand answered the phone? “I called to say hello to my stepdaughter, Mama, and by the way, it seems I’ve lost track of your daughter, my wife....”

Maybe he’d call Paris from Athens. Right now he had a plane to catch.

* * * *

It was almost 5:00 p.m. when Anne-Marie got through to her mother from a phone booth in the Olympic Airlines terminal in Athens, after waiting twenty minutes for the call to go through, but finally, “Hello, Mama...I’m good...Yes, Peter’s good too. Everything’s fine, marvelous.” She stared at the wood panel of the telephone cabinet, enduring her mother’s worried interrogation and listening for sounds of Jennifer in the background.

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